Francis Ford Coppola

Francis Ford Coppola is a sincere storyteller. Coppola’s narrating styles can be distinguished by the scoping of his story context, his signature opening sequences, his attention to subtle details, and the seriousness of the moral messages in his films. The films that the essay will refer includes The Godfather I, The Godfather II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. Francis Coppola is an American film director who produced his most influential works during the New Hollywood wave in the 1970s. Throughout his life, we see that Coppola has been interested in narratology. Coppola was born in a family of Italian immigrant ancestry in Detroit, Michigan in 1939. As he was having contracted polio during his early childhood, he spent much time on the bed, providing the opportunity to immerse himself into the homemade puppet dramas. With the desire of shooting his home movies, he created 8mm features such as “The Rich Millionaire” and “The Lost Wallet”. Along with his passion for theater and film, he was also extremely interested in technology and engineering, which laid the foundation of his utilizing the filming technology to enhance story narratives. As he watched Sergei Eisenstein’s films and the editing technology within them, Coppola decided to start studying in cinema rather than theater. Moreover, as Coppola was close to his brother August Coppola, who was a writer, Francis Coppola then followed his brother into his writing career. Coppola got his college education at Hofstra College and was majoring in scriptwriting. All of his growing experience showed that his real interest has always been telling stories. Coppola’s ability of storytelling is firstly seen from his control over the various scopes of his storylines and settings. If we see Coppola’s films from a macroscopic perspective, they all have overarching social contexts that the stories take place, either regarding historical or political atmospheres. For example, The Godfather series cope with the Italian gangster culture that was prevalent in New York City. The Conversation discusses the morality and privacy of surveillance technology. Apocalypse Now is about one person’s traumatizing experience in the historical context of the Vietnam War. It seems that he is interested in the stories that come with the exterior tension from the surrounding historical or political context. Coppola masters his way to present complex and real worlds, but also pays sufficient attention to the closeup of the personal stories. From the films mentioned above, we see that he is prone to focus his camera on personal stories, and tells their individual stories with genuine interests in the character development. In Apocalypse Now, we follow a group of young soldiers during the Vietnam War trying to complete their war mission. As their boat ride progresses, we see their characters developed. During the scene when the captain decided to shoot the Vietnam girl on the other boat, and eventually killed her, Coppola successfully depicts the change of the characters’, that all of the characters realized what they are experiencing is crazy and inhumane. This almost trivial event during their mission marks the turning point of the character development, which also suggests that Coppola is good at utilizing details to tell the story. Furthermore, when setting up his film worlds, Coppola has the mastery in creating the spectacular but informational opening sequences. As his films usually involve complex relationships between many characters, or complex storylines and subplots, we can see his ability to unfold the worlds and immediately attract the audience to the plot. One can see his deliberately designed opening from the film The Godfather I. The Godfather is an epic film with complicated story settings, numerous characters with intertwining relationship. Coppola has to establish the foundation of the story at the very first scene. It seems almost impossible just to include all of the characters in the opening sequence. However, Coppola did an outstanding job of elaborating the relationship between various characters by showing the interaction between them, and most of the interactions happened without dialogues. Specifically, the scene when the Corleone family takes their photo together, their stance and the composition are so powerful to lay out the settings of their relationships. For example, at the beginning of the film, Sonny was one major leader in the family, so he shows up to the photoshoot along with Don Corleone, and then also meets up with Brasi with Don Corleone. Meanwhile, as Michael was more like an outsider of the family, he shows up the last, but we also see Don Corleone would wait for him to show up and take the picture. We can see Coppola’s confidence during the opening sequence, that he knows his scenes will establish the character relationship well enough for the narrative to begin. The film worlds Coppola creates for the audience is accessible and inviting, yet convey serious messages for various audience. In the movie series The Godfather, some people might think that Coppola was trying to romanticize the gory and violence in the gangster history. However, the reality was that Coppola at the beginning did not want to direct the film series because he was well aware of the possible consequence of an inaccurate representation of the mafia. He was afraid of facing the risk of over-glorifying the mafia history or producing the inauthentic representation of the Sicilian and Italian culture. However, in The Godfather film series, there are mental traits that conveys Coppola’s moral message. For example, as the main male character Michael Corleone grows up to become the new Godfather after the death of his father, we see that his character’s subjectivity is flattened into a monstrous figure, who becomes distant from the audience and unable to resonate with the audience. At the end of two films, the audience loses their trust in Michael, as they know he no longer has the human emotions when he could lie straight in front of his family. Coppola is almost showing an anti-coming-of-age theme, in which the character starts as a sentimental human being who is relatable for the audience, and ends up becoming the inhuman monster that lives under the facade of his social identity. Coppola tells Michael’s story to balance out the romanticization of the mafia story. On the other hand, in The Conversation, Coppola presents the moral dilemma of the protagonist when he needs to decide whether the tapes he recorded will result in murdering the young couple. Through exhibiting the character’s paranoia gets more and more troubling, Coppola puts forth the psychological consequences of the deprived privacy can bring. To conclude, it might be said that Coppola is a conservative film director who still relies on the conventional film styles, but he is undoubtedly professing his narrating skills to the degree that the audience gets trapped in his way of narrating stories and creating movie worlds. Coppola tells the stories without being novel in the technology, but with his genuine and sincere desire of telling the audience stories.